Major update about Rudi’s blog

Hello, friends. How goes it? If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, thank you! You might have come here because you valued an insight in one of my essays about personal growth or meditation. You might have enjoyed the music I make, or appreciated some of my photography. In any case, I’m so glad you’re here.

I have a few announcements about the status of this site. As of today, my main address on the web, rudiseitz.com, will take you to new version of my blog that I’m rolling out. The old version will be archived here at rudiseitz1.wordpress.com.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been following the older version of my blog, and you might have been receiving email updates every time I published a new post. There will be a bit of a disruption, and you won’t be receiving these email updates for a little while. If you want to know what I’ve been writing most recently, just check out rudiseitz.com. Eventually, the email updates will start coming again, but they’ll be coming from a new source, Mailchimp instead of WordPress. Hopefully you’ll stay subscribed, but you’ll have a chance to opt out if you’d rather not continue receiving these updates.

If you’ve left a comment on my old WordPress blog, it’ll still be archived on WordPress, but those older comments won’t immediately show up on my new blog, which is using Disqus as a commenting system. I’m looking at transferring WordPress comments over to Disqus, but that’s still in the works, so please bear with me.

When I started trying to move my blog off of WordPress and onto a new platform — a static site written in Markdown, stored on GitHub, rendered with Hugo, and deployed on Netlify, there were lots of hurdles to get through. Quite honestly, I’m still working to get through some of them and this whole project has been taking quite some time, but I believe it’ll be worth it in the end.

I keep thinking back to one of my more popular posts, 10 Keys To Finishing (see https://rudiseitz.com/essay/10-keys-to-finishing/) and wondering, if I wrote all that and believed it, why the #$&$ is it taking me so long to finish this website transition right now? LOL. Well, my path forward has come from point #7 in that essay. I’ve had to reduce the scope of this overhaul and just pull the trigger and say, look, I’m going to release early, here’s my new site: rudiseitz.com

Hope you like what’s there now, and hope you’ll stay with me as it gets better and better. Your feedback, comments, and engagement are key to that betterment, so please drop me a note if you’re so inclined. What are you looking to read more about? What would you like to see or hear more about from me? Here is a Contact Form you can use to reach me.

If you’ve read this far, thank you again — your attention and interest mean a lot to me, and I’m so glad you’re with me in journey of writing, reflecting, sharing, discussing, and basically trying to carry out a mutually enlightening and beneficial discourse in this, our modern age, as we try to find calm in chaos, fulfill our creative aspirations, improve our world, love one another, and appreciate the moment we’ve been given 🙂

Happy (belated) new year from me, from East Boston, MA, 2024!

Sneak Peak

Hello friends. I’ve been working on a new version of this website. Here’s a sneak peak of what I have so far. If you been missing essays from me here since December 2nd, you’ll find eleven new ones there at the preview site.

The new site is at a temporary address (test.rudiseitz.com) so don’t bookmark it. Eventually it will be live here at my main address, rudiseitz.com, but I’ll be posting more announcements before that change.

What I Learned From A Hole In My Shirt

The Damage

My favorite shirt was light gray with white stripes. The blandness of it made me comfortable. I also loved the fine wool fabric. There was a plain aspect to it, and a fancy aspect. It was a shirt I could wear in any mood.

When I took it off the hanger one day and found a big hole above the left pocket, I was filled with despair.

The moth traps in the closet had been working, I thought. I replaced them just before leaving on a three-week trip. But when I got back home, I discovered some tiny holes that had been nibbled in a few out-of-the-way spots on some of my lesser-worn shirts. I told myself I could live with it. No one would see those holes. But I had missed the worst of the damage.

Now that I was reaching for “light gray with white stripes” I could see that the moths had chosen the most prominent spot on my favorite shirt to chew their biggest hole of all. It didn’t even look “eaten” — more like someone had crudely gashed the shirt with a machete to cut out an inch of the delicate fabric.

“This is too much,” I thought. “I cannot accept this.”

But what could I do? The shirt was ruined.

I had taken precautions, hadn’t I? My absence hadn’t been that long, had it? What were chances that the moths would stumble upon the place where they could inflict the most painful possible damage? Everything about this situation seemed unfair. I should be allowed to have a favorite shirt and not have it get eaten to pieces — right? Is that too much to expect in life?

The Recovery

When I finally took the shirt to a seamstress a week later, she saw the hole and gasped. Her face was first full of shock and horror, then doom. That’s exactly the reaction I had been afraid of when, in days prior, I had been waffling about whether I should even bother trying to get the shirt mended.

“What can be done? What can be done? There’s really nothing that can be done,” she sighed, as she finished inspecting the devastation. “What a shame!”

The seamstress didn’t have matching wool fabric with the same color and pattern; besides, there would be no way to fill the hole without creating seams that would look glaringly out-of-place.

“Just do something, anything,” I pleaded. “Use a bright red patch, for all I care. In fact, I’d like that.”

I had come to the shop with a backup plan in mind, you see. I had been thinking about the Japanese practice of kintsugi, where broken pottery is joined back together with gold or silver, creating shiny, striking seams that bring a new beauty to the mended piece. The idea of kintsugi is that a history of breakage and repair should not be hidden, but showcased. I wondered if I should try to get something like that done with my shirt.

My plan was that if the seamstress said she could do a “normal” repair, I’d ask her to go ahead, but if she threw up her hands, I’d propose the equivalent of kintsugi.

“You can do something different with this shirt,” I explained, “It doesn’t have to look like it used to look. Make it odd. Make the patch stand out. Make it so people will see the repair. I just want to be able to wear my shirt again.” She agreed to do it for five dollars. I confirmed that I really did want her to use red.

Things were on an upswing now. A week earlier, I was ready to throw the shirt away; now it would be salvaged. But I was still pissed that the moths had done what they’d done. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get over it.

I waited six days for the pickup date on my receipt.

They say, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” It occurred to me that that’s what I was trying to do with this situation. But I still felt that I had lost something dear to me. I was annoyed to have to go through all this trouble to try to get it back.

When I picked the shirt up, the seamstress winked at me. The patch looked exactly like I imagined. A large seam, and bright red that clashed with the gray fabric. A dress shirt with a flash of color that’s totally out of place. Damn moths!

But when I put the shirt on after I got home, I couldn’t help but smile. “I’ve got my favorite shirt back,” I thought, “Only better.” At last, I felt at ease. Things had been made right. A happy ending had been wrangled.

I’m wearing the shirt as I write, and in thinking about the journey the shirt and I have been on, I’ve got a few observations that apply to flipping any situation around, making lemonade when life hands you lemons, practicing kintsugi, or any other form of the art of creative recovery.

Observation 1: On Change

The first observation is that what I had was a dress shirt, but what I got back isn’t a dress shirt anymore. With the big red patch, it’s not suitable for a formal occasion. I’d wear it to a coffee shop, a casual party, or around the house. I can use the shirt to make a statement, or to start a conversation. The shirt still has a use, but the use is different from before.

The takeaway is that when something’s busted and you try to fix it in a creative way, you shouldn’t expect to get back the same thing or the same situation you had before. Maybe you’ve lost the original thing for good. You’ve got to be open to accepting a different thing with a different use.

Observation 2: On Practice

The second observation is that the moth damage was an extremely upsetting situation that didn’t matter a wit in the grand scheme of my life. The low stakes of this situation made it easy to try an unconventional fix — something with a large chance of failure.

The takeaway is that if you want to practice “making lemonade” — if you want to practice flipping situations around — it’s good to do your practice on inconsequential problems.

All of us face situations in life where something goes dramatically wrong and the consequences are huge. A major accident. Divorce. Loss of a loved one. Loss of a job. Those are the times we need the skill of “making lemonade” the most. But those are also the times when we’re feeling the most overwhelmed. They are not the ideal times to start building the skill of creative recovery.

Situations that are frustrating but relatively harmless and insignificant — like a hole in a shirt — are great practice opportunities. I didn’t initially think of the moth damage as a “practice opportunity” but that’s what it came to be. I’ll try to remember, next time something small but very upsetting happens: it’s a kintsugi workshop, it’s lemonade practice, it’s a chance to develop a technique and an outlook that will come in handy later.

Observation 3: On Following Through

The third observation is that I remained bitter about the damage to my shirt all the way up to the conclusion of the salvage effort.

When I first had the idea of going to the seamstress, I was still upset. When I came up with my plan to ask for the red patch, I was still upset. When I went to the shop and dropped off the shirt, I still hadn’t forgiven the moths.

The magic moment did not occur until I put the mended shirt on for the first time and looked at myself in the mirror. Wearing the shirt again — that’s when I finally felt the situation had been resolved. That’s when I finally stopped cursing the moths and actually felt a bit of appreciation for the journey they’d sent me on.

The lesson is that “making lemonade” is all about the follow-through. It’s about getting to the point where you can consume what you’ve made. Practicing kintsugi is about closing the deal — finishing the repair and putting the fractured vessel back into service.

When something upsetting happens, people might tell you, “Think positively — you can turn this situation around.” To evaluate their advice, you try to imagine something you could do to make the situation better. When you find that this thought brings no relief, you chalk off the advice as useless, impractical, or simply not right for you. But you’re drawing that conclusion too soon.

Just being aware that you could creatively reframe a situation and turn it to your advantage — that’s not enough. Just beginning to take positive action is still not enough. In my case, the idea that I might be able to get the shirt repaired didn’t bring calm and acceptance. I could have kept that possibility in mind and never acted on it, and I’d still be pissed. What helped was actually going through with it.

When you’re trying to turn a situation around, you can’t expect to feel better just by doing things in your mind — forming an intention or planning to take a restorative action or even getting started but stopping midway. I was thinking, “This is silly! This isn’t going to work,” all the way up until I got my shirt back. But when I finally wore it, then I thought, “This is one of the best things I’ve done all year!”

If someone says “You can turn this situation around” don’t try to test that idea by thinking about how you’d do it — test it by actually doing it. And when you get started, don’t expect to feel better immediately. Wait to pass judgement until you’ve gotten all the way to an outcome, like wearing your patched-up shirt as you pose for a selfie.

The Time Of My Life

Here’s a method for transforming a frustrating situation — like sitting in traffic — into a tolerable, even pleasant experience. Just say to yourself, “This is the time of my life!”

Are these words going to make everything better, as if by magic? Surely not. The magic comes from believing them, if you can.

But how might you persuade yourself that sitting in traffic is really the time of your life? As the hundreds of cars in front of you refuse to budge, you’re thinking, “This is hell. I hate it. I can’t wait for this situation to be over!” But “the time of one’s life” refers to “an extremely pleasurable experience” or “an occasion of outstanding enjoyment.” Safe to say, you don’t think of traffic as an occasion of outstanding enjoyment.

To believe that a frustrating situation is really the time of your life — that’s where the “method” comes in. What’s on offer here is an interpretive method. Imagine that the words, “I’m having the time of my life,” have already been written down — they comprise a miniature “text” — and now you’re going to explore different interpretations of the text as it applies to your current situation. You’re going to search for a meaning in the text that you can embrace. We’ll look at three possibilities.

Interpretation 1: Time is luck

An interesting way to interpret the phrase, “the time of one’s life,” is to focus on the word “time.” When you say “This is the time of my life,” you could mean, “These are the seconds, minutes, and hours that make up my life. I’m lucky to have them.”

We all want time, don’t we? We want to live long lives. The quest for a fountain of youth is age-old. Treasures are spent each day, attempting to forestall death by a little bit. The field of life extension has never lacked customers. Longevity is the stuff of blessings: “Live long and prosper!”

Well here it is, right now, as you wait in traffic — here’s some of that coveted stuff called time. It’s yours. These very moments that you’re living through — they’re a little chunk of the precious time you’ve been given as a sentient being on planet Earth. They’re a portion of your total allotment.

Time seems to slow down in the face of frustration and discomfort: an unpleasant situation drags on forever. In a way that’s good, right? It means more time for you — at least, the perception of more time: the experience of a longer hour, the feeling of a day that keeps on going.

Of course, when a situation is truly unpleasant, we wish time would behave in the opposite way, that it would speed up and pass quickly, so that we wouldn’t have to suffer a lengthy ordeal. But would you make a trade? Would you choose to fast-forward through an annoying experience right now if, as payment for that privilege, you’d have to forfeit that same amount of time at the end of your life? Would you choose the luxury of skipping a present discomfort in exchange for an accelerated death?

There’s a possible future in which this trade could be a good one. If your progress toward death turns out to be full of suffering, then perhaps you’d be glad to shave off a little bit of time at the very end.

But you probably have no idea how the end of your life is actually going to take shape. Each moment in your final days might be felt — by you and by the people who are close to you — as indescribably precious. In that case, it would be a terrible deal to sacrifice some of those invaluable final moments so you wouldn’t have to sit in traffic now.

Sitting in traffic might feel like a “waste” of time — certainly it’s not your ideal way of spending time — but it’s still part of the time you get.

Whenever time is is not filled with the thing you want, there’s a temptation to imagine how you could have used it instead. But to get lost contemplating an imaginary choice between sitting in traffic and, say, sipping a martini on the beach — that’s only a recipe for intensified frustration. To imagine ways you could have avoided this traffic and gotten something better — that’s not an application of imagination that will aid you now.

If you want to imagine a choice, don’t imagine past ones that can’t be remade. Think about an available choice instead. Would you choose to guard, to keep, to defend this time that you’re living through right now — traffic and all — or would you let it be stolen from you by an unscrupulous thief? You want to keep your time, right? You don’t want a thief to run away with your time. Who is the thief who could do this? Only you have the power to rob yourself of time’s value, by cursing it, by wishing it away.

If you’re lucky enough that your life turns out to be long, then this time spent sitting in traffic right now will be a part of all the time that adds up to make it long. In that sense, this traffic ordeal contributes to your longevity.

Time flies when you’re having fun, they say. If that’s true, then isn’t it sort of good that you’re not always having fun? Your whole life could fly by in an instant.

Could you accept it as slightly fortunate that there are long, arduous, seemingly interminable experiences in ample supply, ready and waiting to serve you? Ready to serve as ballast, ready to make life feel weighty and substantive, ready to keep time from seeming to move too fast, ready to help you perceive whatever vastness there is to be found in the time you’ve been given?

Could you accept it as slightly fortunate that you’ve got this time to sit in traffic rather than not having this time at all?

Interpretation 2: Directing one’s own attention is a privilege

Another way to interpret the phrase, “This is the time of my life,” is to apply it to an overlooked aspect of your current experience, something other than waiting for the traffic to move. What’s something else that you’re doing right now? Is there anything more you’re doing as you wait that could plausibly give you “an extremely pleasurable experience”?

You’re also breathing right now.

And if you have the mental bandwidth to fret over the traffic, then you have the bandwidth to practice breath awareness. You can try to focus your attention on the sensation of each alternating inhale and exhale. You can nudge your breath cycle to be a bit smoother, slower, and calmer as you sit. You can keep doing this until you’ve noticed a small change.

Waiting in traffic might not be “the time of your life” but practicing breath awareness can be pretty great.

The key is to recognize that this practice is a privilege. As a human who’s been afforded a bunch of years to be alive on his planet, you are not guaranteed the opportunity to focus your attention on breathing at any particular time.

A situation could be so taxing as to demand all of your attention and leave you no room to be aware of your breathing. A situation could be so alarming as to make you hyperventilate uncontrollably, stealing your ability to shape the way you breathe. You could be coughing and sneezing with a bad cold. You could have grown up in a way where you wouldn’t have the patience to practice breath awareness, or where you wouldn’t have the conviction that this practice is worthwhile.

Whenever you can connect with your breathing and sustain the connection, that’s good fortune. If you’re able to breathe calmly and smoothly right now, then you’ve succeeded: you’re not too distracted to do it, you’re not too agitated to do it, you’re not too sick to do it, you’re not too ignorant of its value to do it. You’ve found a source of inner poise amidst a frustrating situation. You’ve been able to repurpose that frustrating situation as laboratory for the ancient practice of breathwork — the same practice that meditators, monks, and yogis consider as a path to enlightenment. You’re walking that path along with them.

Indeed, if you meditate, you know that simple, sustained breath awareness can lead to great calm, and sometimes beyond, into a state of bliss. While you might not be feeling blissful right now, as the traffic continues, you’ve still been able to use this time to perform a practice that can lead to bliss. You get credit for cultivating that practice — the investment can only benefit you.

If you have the privilege of practicing breath awareness right now, there’s a case to be made that this really is the time of your life. It’s a special moment that has the potential to rise to the level of outstanding pleasure. The moment gains this potential because of how you’re choosing to spend it, how you’re choosing to focus your attention.

Interpretation 3: Humor Helps

Now we come to a third interpretation, where we take the idiom “the time of one’s life” to mean what it’s supposed to mean without any interpretive tricks. We’re left with the straightforward premise that sitting in traffic is so wonderful, it’s just the best thing there is. This is the claim that seems ridiculous — the one we can’t get ourselves to believe — so what use is it to say this?

One possible use of the phrase, “this is the time of my life,” taken in the standard sense, is to disrupt the flow of negative thoughts. If you’re still thinking, “This is hell. I hate it. I can’t wait for this situation to be over!” then saying “This is the time of my life!” is a way to shake things up, even if you don’t really believe it. It’s a polite way to tell the negative thoughts to shut up.

A second use is comic relief. “This is the time of my life!” could be a sarcastic comment that you make to express how much you disdain the experience of sitting in traffic. Mindfulness techniques and positivity culture can seem overly earnest and humor-free at times, but here’s a chance to bring some snark into the mix. If the snark creates some levity or brings even the hint of a smile, then go for it. “Yeah, traffic. Loving every moment — time of my life!”

Sarcasm transforms “This is the time of my life!” into a negative thought itself, but you needn’t linger on the bitter aftertaste of the sarcasm. You can instead linger on the feeling of being able to laugh a little bit, which is positive.

Synthesis

If you’ve explored these three interpretations of “This is the time of my life” as they relate to your present situation, whether it be traffic, root canal, taxes, boring meeting, delayed flight, dinner companion who won’t stop talking, whatever, then the phrase should have acquired some depth in your mind by now. It’s become more than a superficially ridiculous thing to say in the present situation. You’ve found meanings inside the phrase that you can begin to believe. You’ve noticed some practical utility that the phrase might hold.

Now it’s time to let all those meanings and possibilities blend together in your mind, so that “This is the time of my life!” is no longer bound to one specific meaning, but it comes to represent all of them together — all the of angles you’ve considered, all of the ways you’ve looked for sense in those words.

If you’ve followed the interpretations presented here, then you’ve considered the phrase in three specific ways. You’ve seen it as an expression of appreciation for the time you’ve been given. You’ve seen it as an affirmation your good fortune to be breathing with awareness and intention right now, even as the frustrating situation continues. And you’ve seen it as a way of interrupting a torrent of negative thoughts and injecting a bit of comic relief into the situation.

1. “This is the time of my life — it’s some of the time I get.”
2. “This is the time of my life because I have the privilege of breathing with awareness right now.”
3. “This is the time of my life — not!”

Now try keeping all those ideas in mind at once as you say it:

“This is the time of my life!”

Maybe it is?

How to overcome writer’s block

Writing would be easy if you had one helpful shortcoming: if you couldn’t notice flaws in what you wrote.

If you lacked the capacity to be dissatisfied with the words that landed on the page, you’d never get stuck.

If you were totally insensitive to badness, that doesn’t mean you’d be able to write well, but at least you’d be able to do it without pain and frustration.

When we experience writer’s block, that’s because we don’t like something about what we’ve written and we’re not sure how to fix it. Maybe our writing is not eloquent enough. Not persuasive. Not interesting. It’s too wordy, repetitive, vague, roundabout, and wasteful. Even when we “have nothing to say,” we really do. The problem is that we have nothing to say that we like. Writer’s block is trouble managing dissatisfaction.

Sometimes it feels that by putting a few thoughts down on a piece of paper — just a few — we’re generating a huge amount of work for ourselves. Disproportionately huge. That’s because we’re not perfect — we’re flawed humans — and our flaws manifest in the words we write.

A first draft, even a short one, is bound to be full of bad things. It’s teeming with problems that need to be fixed. And that fixing requires labor.

Anyone can scribble, but if we want our writing to shine we’ve got to pay our dues. We’ve got to weed out all of the sins and infelicities that were committed in our earlier drafts, no matter how tedious and painful that process becomes.

But this view of writing is demoralizing. It’s like we’re encountering misfortune as soon as we begin to write, and now we’ve got to extricate ourselves from that misfortune.

All those flaws in our work — we wish they weren’t there. Why do we have to be so wordy? What a shame! Why do our thoughts have to be so scattered and arrive at the page in such a jumble of incoherence? What a shame! In an ideal world, those unnecessary words, those useless sentences would never have been there at all. In the present world, they are there, but they shouldn’t be.

What is a different, more inspiring way to look at writing? It starts with faith. We’ve got to believe our essay should exist. We’ve got to believe our point should be made. We’ve got to believe our voice should be heard.

Now let’s consider anything we put on the page — anything — as a stepping stone towards that goal.

But we don’t have the “right” for our essay to manifest all in one piece, perfect the first time. We’ve got to go through a process of bringing it into being.

To create a thing that doesn’t yet exist, we’ve got to begin revealing it, and then keep revealing more of it. Vagueness happens when we reveal a little more than we yet understand, and that’s what allows for progress. Flaws are a sign that we are manifesting the necessary flexibility to keep the process in motion. Errors are the concomitants of revelation.

You can’t be rigid when you create something. You’ve got to experiment and adapt and put some ideas forward without yet knowing if they’re right. Defects are proof that you’re experimenting, which is to say they’re proof that you’re taking the posture that’s necessary for creation.

When you fix a “flaw” in your writing, you are not extricating something bad. Rather, you are removing something that has already fulfilled its purpose of moving you forward.

That redundant statement of your point, that unclear sentence, that confusing tangent — when you wrote them down, they helped you stay in motion, they helped you search for what you really wanted to say. They were possibilities. They were prospects you explored. They served as points of comparison to help you discover what’s essential versus inessential in your work.

Now it’s time for them to go, but not because they’re intrinsically bad — quite the opposite, they did their job and now it’s done. They were never your enemies, they were temporary assistants, like strips of masking tape that were needed in one phase of creating a sculpture, but not the next.

Even a humble typo is good in a way — it’s a sign you were writing quickly, allowing ideas to flow — and it’s easily corrected.

When you delete text that’s not useful anymore, don’t be angry at it. Don’t wish it had never been there in the first place. Even if a sentence is “ugly,” don’t think of it as an evil thing that’s preventing your writing from being good. Give it a little love — it was present, it was part of your process, it helped you stay in motion — now delete it with a bit of respect for the purpose it served.

If you have a sense of what you love in prose, if you have a high standard you’re aspiring to reach, you’ll find it’s very easy to get angry when you write.

But anger is not the way to finishing.

None of these ideas are specific to writing though. It’s the same for any project, anything you try to do. You get stuck when you see flaws in your work as signs of your own misfortune. You get stuck when you look at those flaws as sticky, immovable burdens, locking you into a state of dissatisfaction. You get stuck when you allow those flaws to fill you with doubt and loathing.

You get unstuck when you see those same flaws as stepping stones to the next phase of your work. You get unstuck when you learn to be thankful for the bad parts of your emerging creation, because those bad parts are placeholders that have been helping the whole thing take shape, and now they give you something to engage with further: something to refine, something to improve, something that keeps you moving.

None of these ideas are specific to writing, but writing is perfect testing ground for them, because writing involves so many choices that can lead you in so many different directions. If you allow one particular philosophy to govern all those little choices, then the outcome of your writing project is going to be a reification of that philosophy, an example of what it can do.

So if you want to compare the consequences of different attitudes, like optimism versus pessimism, or self-compassion versus self-criticism, or faith versus doubt, just try taking one or the other attitude while you write an essay. Then see how the essay comes out, or whether it comes out at all.

The alcohol tax

Drinking is a trade. Alcohol gives you a good experience one day, in exchange for a tax that you pay the next day. But if you’re able to practice moderation, you can avoid the steepest form of that tax. Pace yourself, limit your quantity, drink plenty of water, and you won’t pay with a hangover. You might really sleep OK, get up on time the next morning, and feel totally alright.

Drinking then seems like a worthwhile trade. You get so much enjoyment from it, and the tax is so small that you might forget you’re even paying it. “I can have what I want as long as I’m not too greedy, and everything’s going to be fine.”

But the tax is there. Maybe you’re not waking up with a raging headache, but your body is still in recovery, still dealing with what you drank yesterday. You might feel decent enough, but you’re not quite at peak.

As you get into a routine of making this trade – good times in exchange for a bearable tax – you might forget how it feels to wake up without yesterday’s alcohol dragging you down. The drag becomes so familiar that you can’t notice it anymore.

If you take a pause from drinking, you can be startled by a new experience: beginning the day with a clean slate, not having to recover from yesterday, not being burdened by alcohol’s lingering weight. And now it becomes clear that the tax you had stopped noticing – it was there and you were paying it.

To be free from that tax feels good. To start a new day as a new day — one that’s not saddled by the previous day’s consumption — feels good. It’s refreshing to wake up unencumbered — to begin moving forward, without first having to settle the bill. No smelly breath. No nagging question about how long your body is going to let you keep going on like this. Nothing to get out from under.

But this newfound freedom and lightness might not amount to a Eureka moment where your entire life seems indisputably improved. Getting out of bed on a cold, dark morning when you have stressful tasks waiting is still hard. Life is still full of trouble.

Drinking gave you so many moments of relaxation and abandon. It curated so many social experiences. It took you to so many fun destinations. It comforted you. It helped you forget about your problems. Now you’re on your own.

If you abstain long enough, you might stop appreciating your freedom from the alcohol tax, because you’ve gotten used to not paying it. The way it feels to wake up and not be recovering from yesterday’s drinking — that’s your new normal and it doesn’t seem so special anymore. Your problems haven’t gone away: they still come rushing to mind in the morning, no matter that you didn’t drink the night before.

When you end this hiatus you’ve taken, the experience of reconnecting with alcohol might stand out as amazingly wonderful. Again, the tax you pay the next day might seem very minor in comparison to what you gained: good times, relaxation, adventure, pleasure. Drinking might seem like a good deal again – it affords great experiences in exchange for a moderate, manageable cost. You can very easily slip back into your old habit, really believing you’re making a worthwhile trade.

What you’re not seeing is how that tax is going to accumulate over time. Maybe it’s small price to pay on any given morning, but what does it add up to when you’re paying it day after day over months and years? Eventually, you go into a kind of debt, and that debt has consequences that can seem mysterious, inexplicable, not easily traced to alcohol itself.

Maybe you’re feeling depressed? You can’t blame it squarely on alcohol. But perhaps it was alcohol that made you lazy enough in the mornings that you stopped going for brisk walks before breakfast like you otherwise would have done. Without exercise in the early mornings, you felt more physically restless sitting in a chair throughout the day, which led to more distractibility and procrastination, which made you stressed out, which made you desperate for a drink in the evenings, all while dragging your mood down.

Stop drinking again and the problem doesn’t go away immediately. Stop drinking and you don’t suddenly regain the exercise routine that would have helped you stay in balance – you’ve got to build that from scratch. Easier to drink.

Imagine someone knocked on your door and said “I’m offering a service. I’m going to entertain you, curate your social life, guide you to enjoyable venues, and be your way of relaxing and relieving stress, and you’re going to pay me $99.99 a week.”

Would you sign up for that service? What if you knew the fee was going to increase in time? What if you knew it was going to be hard to cancel? What if you knew the service provider was going to brainwash you to believe the fee was worthwhile, making it impossible for you to objectively reevaluate the deal? What if you knew the service was going to consume a huge amount of your time while presenting you with a limited set of options?

What if you knew that for all the relief and levity and fun you’d be getting from this service, there might be an inexplicable moment of anxiety thrown in, a bad mood that occurs for no apparent reason, a feeling of sluggishness that you’ll find hard to blame on anything specific, and a drag on your overall well-being that won’t be easy to identify or understand?

The importance of alcohol

Would beer mean anything to me now? Would I remember what the fuss had been about? My upcoming sip was about to reveal the answer.

Teetotaling had been an unshakeable choice for me since February 2020, the onset of the Covid pandemic. While other people endured isolation by drinking “quarantinis,” I was so terrified of getting sick that I couldn’t touch alcohol — what if it weakened my immunity? This abstinence lasted six months.

But now it was already August of 2020. My friends and I were gathered on a bright, sweaty afternoon in Marblehead, MA, lounging on a porch with a view of sailboats crisscrossing the tiny islands in Salem Sound. There were two six-packs of cold beer in an icebox and I had just opened the first can. We had survived the anxious, uncertain months prior and it didn’t look like we were going to die. We were finally together and ready to celebrate.

Beer didn’t seem important to me anymore. If I could live so easily without it, why had I ever needed it?

My first sip after all those dry months could have been a disappointment. Beer might have tasted bitter and its effects might have seemed unpleasant.

But the opposite happened. It was magic.

I could feel a sense of ease spread throughout my whole being.

This moment had many things working in its favor: the ocean view, the sun and seagulls, the company of friends after months of isolation. But alcohol blended these elements together in a way that heightened the experience indescribably.

In the past six months, I had done vigorous exercise. I had binge-watched Netflix. Laughed at comedy. Practiced pranayama. Gotten lost in music, and in cooking. Each was relaxing in its own way. But nothing had created the sense of sweet intoxication that I was feeling now — a kind of fluid relief that seemed to eclipse all others. It was primal.

I would have liked my first sip to prove that alcohol had nothing left to offer me and that I could ditch it for good. Instead, I gained evidence for the idea that alcohol was special. It was the key to a variety of experience that I simply couldn’t reach by other means. I hadn’t felt this dreamy and wonderful in a long, long time.

What happened next?

After fifteen minutes of bliss, the good feeling began to slip away, so I poured another beer to keep it going. That did the trick.

The next day, I wanted to feel that same magic again, so I had another beer. This time, the effect was blah. No repeat of the previous day’s revelation.

What happened after that?

I kept chasing the magic of that first sip. In the following weeks, beer showed its promise often enough that I stayed in pursuit. It was blah on one occasion, then blah again, but then totally amazing.

Soon enough, I was back in a routine of wanting and looking forward to beer every single day. How much was I actually drinking? Not enough to interfere with work or daily responsibilities. Not enough to leave me with raging hangovers. Not enough to stop me from waking up on time the next morning and going about my day. Not enough to be seen as a problem.

“Addiction” never seemed like the right word for my relationship with alcohol. Even “dependence” seems too strong and too clinical. The word that fits is “importance.” Whenever I allow alcohol into my life, it always becomes very important to me. And my first sip in August 2020 revealed the simple reason for that. The reason is that alcohol is magic. Anything possessing such magic is going to become important, more so than I want it to be.

What’s more important to me, fitness or alcohol? It can seem like they’re equally important. At different times in my life, I’ve had a daily yoga practice, and have been an avid hiker, all while adoring beer. I’ve even combined beer and exercise by walking five miles to a brewery and then back home — that’s a heavenly Saturday for me. One of my travel highlights was hiking Mount Untersberg in Austria and being greeted by a beer garden near the summit. Europe knows how to do this combination.

But in the end, fitness and alcohol can’t remain as comfortable peers. One of the two is going to win over the other. If I’m drinking every day, then alcohol is on the path to winning. Any rainy, dark evening is a test of this. When the weather is nasty and I’m tired, will I go out for a jog in my waterproof coat because I’m looking forward the high that exercise gives me? Or will I put on that same coat to rush to the store to make sure I get my beer and my buzz? Each occasion might work out differently, and sometimes I might really choose the jog, but over time a pattern becomes clear. Other things can be skipped. Beer is the thing I don’t skip. Beer is the thing I don’t compromise on. Beer is the thing whose importance is always respected.

As I write this, I’m on another hiatus from drinking. It started after I wrote my last essay about alcohol and got a fitness tracker. I feel just like I did in August 2020 before that special sip: beer doesn’t seem important at all because I’ve gone without it for quite a while and have done just fine.

But I’m not ready to say I’m quitting for good. So what’s the message I’d like to convey to my future self who will probably have a beer in the coming months and fall in love all over again?

You’re playing with magic. If you’re going to play with magic, you’ve got a question to answer: how will you control the magic? How will you stop this magic’s importance from growing and growing in your life?

That’s not a question about fluid ounces, so it applies even if your intake falls in the range of “moderate.” Regardless of what quantity you’re consuming, the question’s the same: how will you make sure you don’t value your beer so very, very much? How will you keep alcohol in a state of reduced significance? How will you make sure that you sometimes skimp on drinking, sometimes forget about it, sometimes absentmindedly neglect to procure your beverage because something else was more compelling?

How will you make sure that you occasionally choose not to go out drinking when the opportunity presents itself and your friends are game, or when the bottle is there and you’re all alone? How will you make sure that alcohol sometimes meets your indifference or whimsical disregard, not just your excitement, your hope, your persistence in always getting it? How will you make sure that when there’s a choice between drinking and being active, you more often choose activity, and when you’ve finished, you don’t look to alcohol as a reward?

How will you make sure that if you’re planning to drink, and you’ve been looking forward to it all day, but the plan gets disrupted at the last minute, you feel totally alright because other things matter more and alcohol isn’t that important?

Is writing a good deal?

When I actually make it to a cocktail party, I don’t always introduce myself as a writer because the other person might feel sorry for me.

When you tell someone about a major pursuit in your life, they often have one question on their mind: what does it mean for you socially? Of course you care about what you’re doing — that’s a given — but what do other people think?

If I’m a writer, then how many readers do I have? Who’s talking about my writing? Where is it published? What recognition have I gotten for it? Do I get paid for any of it?

If I’m not getting paid for my writing — not in money, not in recognition, not in influence — then the other person can’t help but think that I’ve gotten lost in a fruitless endeavor and perhaps I need to be rescued from it.

But I wouldn’t be writing if it weren’t fruitful.

I’m writing to learn.

For me, writing is fruitful if it helps me understand something that matters to me. Writing is fruitful if it helps me grow as a person. Writing is fruitful if it helps me carry what I’ve learned into the future.

When I decided to make meditation a part of my life, I began practicing it every morning. But I’m a writer. So what did I do in addition to meditating? I wrote essays about meditation. Those essays were my vehicle for working through the challenges I faced. Those essays are my way of remembering the lessons I learned but might have otherwise forgotten.

What was the value of the hundreds of hours that I invested in toiling over those essays if I didn’t get paid, praised, or even noticed for writing them? Well, I got better at meditation.

Just this morning, when I hit an obstacle in my meditation practice, I remembered an essay I had written about that same obstacle and it gave me a path forward.

All those essays – and the countless hours I spent writing them – are a measure of how much I care about meditation and want to make it a part of my life. Thirty essays worth. A thousand hours worth. That’s how much.

It’s the same with anything I write about. Writing is my gym practice away from the actual game. But the benefits of this practice don’t come from brainstorming or journaling alone. The benefits come from going through all the steps to shape, revise, and finish an essay and make it public, and there’s a struggle in that. Writing is hard and it takes a long time. So it can seem like a really bad deal.

A bad deal is when you invest a lot and you don’t get much in return. If you’re not learning when you write, then writing is the worst deal there is.

But writing can also be the best deal. That happens when you write about something that you really want to understand or remember. If that question or that topic is important enough to you, then all the struggle — all the scribbling and revising and getting stuck and finding your way forward only to get stuck again — all that is a pittance to pay for the riches of insight.

When I’m writing about the things I really want know, I’m getting a good deal. When my reasons for writing are solid, then writing never lets me down.

But my essays are more than tools for my own education. My essays are more than “savings” that I’m passing on to my future self. The magic of writing is that I can do it for myself but it might benefit someone else as well.

So what’s why I publish here. I’m sharing my writing with you in the hopes that if you and I have some things in common — a few of the same challenges and a few of the same potentials — then a few of the same insights that have helped me on my path can help you too on yours.

On Hidden Sources Of Fitness

I was walking home from the supermarket the other day when my wrist started vibrating.

I pulled up my cuff and saw the new fitness tracking wristband I had forgotten I was wearing. 

The screen said “Congratulations, Rudi! You have met your goal!”

“What goal?” I thought. “What is even going on?”

I had purchased this wristband just a day earlier. I thought I’d use it to monitor my heart rate as I began a new exercise routine.

Now that I was wearing this new device, it had started tracking my steps along with my heart rate, and without asking me, it had set a goal of 7500 steps a day. 

My “success” at meeting this goal came as a surprise to me, not only because I hadn’t known about the goal, and hadn’t wanted the device to track my steps in the first place, but because I tend to think of my walk to the supermarket as a “nothing” walk. It’s a purely practical walk I take to get bread and peanut butter. It doesn’t count for anything. 

When I go on a “real” walk, a long walk that extends far outside my neighborhood, this supermarket is the landmark I see on the way back home that tells me I’m almost there. If I only make it to that nearby landmark, and then I go straight back home, I haven’t really gone anywhere, have I?

But according to my fitness tracker, the round trip is a full 7500 steps. 

I have a reputation for underestimating the time it takes to get somewhere on foot. If I say that a place is “right around the corner” it might not be. “We can walk there in five minutes,” means “It’ll take fifteen if we go fast.” I always want to believe it’s possible to walk.

What do I take away from the fitness tracker’s insight that my “nothing” walk is not nothing? 

When I felt that unexpected jubilant buzzing and saw the celebratory text flashing on the device’s miniature screen, it was the first time in my life I had received praise for completing such a routine activity – taking one of my humdrum, practical, boring, “nothing” walks along the busy main streets in my neighborhood with rush-hour traffic underway. It’s fun to be congratulated for a thing that you didn’t even think of as “a thing.” Who or what besides a fitness tracker would ever give me positive feedback on walking to my local Shaw’s and back? Certainly not myself.

And there’s the problem. It’s good that I’m not reluctant to walk to the supermarket. I can get a decent amount of exercise from this errand alone –  two to three miles of walking depending on what route I take – without even thinking about it or planning it.

But the fact that I consider it a “nothing” walk means that when I don’t take it, I might not realize that anything’s missing. Why would it matter if I skip “nothing”? 

There are lots of situations that can prevent me from taking this walk. If the weather is horrible one week, I won’t take the walk. If I get a ride to the supermarket, I won’t take the walk. If I’m really busy and stressed out, maybe I’ll have groceries delivered to my door, and I won’t take the walk. And if don’t take my “nothing” walk for many days in a row, then as for exercise, I might be getting literally nothing.

The bigger lesson I take from all this is that sometimes we’re not aware of the hidden infrastructure in our lives, the hidden sources of fitness or wellness that we rely on without knowing what they are.

I’ve been talking about physical exercise, but socializing is another important part of wellness. When I was working at a startup in the early 2000s, the office moved to a far-away location in the suburbs where I had a two-hour commute by public transportation in the mornings — several subways and a bus. In the evenings, I used to catch a ride home with a co-worker and during that ride home, we’d chat and vent and reminisce and talk about anything and everything.

While I would never choose to have that arduous two-hour commute in the mornings, there was an unanticipated benefit of the office moving far away. It caused me to get rides home with co-workers which meant that every single day, I was getting at least an hour of social time. 

When I started working from home, that daily hour of social time went to zero. A pillar of overall wellbeing was suddenly knocked away, but I didn’t notice it because I never thought about that ride as important except for the practical purpose of getting home. We can lose things that matter to us but if we never thought they mattered, we might struggle to understand why we feel so different when they’re gone.

Back to physical fitness, you know, my living space has two floors. I wasn’t looking for two floors when I chose the place; I would have been perfectly happy with one large floor. But the two-floor situation means there’s a staircase I walk up and down probably twenty times a day. I wonder how much of my fitness depends on that one flight of stairs that I never planned or sought to have?

Comparing Alcohol To What?

Does it make any sense to compare “life with alcohol” to “life without alcohol”?

That’s surely the comparison you’d make if you’re thinking about drinking less or quitting. But is it the right comparison?

Stories abound where someone quits drinking – they try “life without alcohol,” and discover that they feel so much better than they used to feel. Reflecting on the before-and-after, they vow they’ll never add alcohol back into their life. I sometimes wish that were my story.

I’ve subtracted alcohol from my life many times over the years. And I’ve stayed “on the wagon” for months at a time, without much struggle. But I never had that moment of revelation where life seemed so much better than before.

I always saved a lot of money and felt like I had more time, that’s true. I probably slept better. But the difference was never quite the “Aha!” that other people talk about. 

Recently it dawned on me that I’ve been making the wrong comparison. That’s because when I drink, I’m looking for alcohol to assist me in specific ways – to fill certain roles in my life, to perform certain functions or services. When I consider “life minus alcohol,” I’m considering life without all of those needs being filled. I’m taking something away and leaving a hole there, and of course life is not going to feel great with a hole, even when the side-effects and harmful aspects of that missing thing are now gone themselves.

To do the comparison right – to really reevaluate my relationship with alcohol – I’d have to go beyond abstaining. I have to find new ways of filling the roles that alcohol was playing in my life. Once I had replaced alcohol, finding new ways to obtain the same services that alcohol was providing, I could compare this new life with the old drinking life.

If I was thinking about quitting TV, I could throw my TV out the window and see how I felt. But I might not feel great unless I replaced the TV with radio, or replaced the TV with reading, or replaced the TV with going to a live theater performance once a week, or some combination of all three. So to make a decision about keeping TV in my life, I shouldn’t compare “TV” versus “no TV.” I should compare “TV” versus “radio, reading, and live theater instead of TV.” 

What does that mean for alcohol? What are all the things I’d need to do instead of alcohol, to fill the roles it plays? To answer that, I’d first need to understand what those roles are.

So here’s a list of roles that I’d like filled, needs that I’d like satisfied, services that I’d like performed:

• I’d like a way of achieving rapid physical relaxation when I’m feeling tense and tight.
• I’d like a reward I can give myself to celebrate achievements and commemorate special occasions. 
• I’d like a pick-me-up I can use to brighten my mood and create a celebratory feel when everything seems dark and upsetting – a tonic that makes things feel “OK” when they otherwise don’t.
• I’d like a boredom reliever – something I can reliably enjoy doing when I can’t figure out what to do. Something that helps me feel different when I’m tired of feeling the same old way. Something that “shakes things up” and creates a sense of variety when there is none.
• I’d like a harshness reducer – something that helps me ease up when I’m feeling highly critical of myself and others and the situations we find ourselves in.
• I’d like a source of fun destinations to visit, places to spend time where people are relaxed and in a good mood and it’s easy to “chill” and enjoy being there for hours.
• I’d like a location enhancer – something that helps me pass the time in a particular place and feel like I’m having a significant experience there. Something that can convert a drab place into a fun one.
• I’d like a mental relaxant. Something that helps me stop worrying, enjoy the moment, and feel less inhibited. A catalyst for presence and spontaneity. 
• I’d like a social lubricant – something that helps to calm social discomfort, whether it be anxiety, impatience, or frustration.
• I’d like something that facilitates bonding and shared experience.
• I’d like a source of satisfying, anchoring ritual in my life. 
• I’d like a source of compelling sensory experiences, a source of interesting flavors and aromas with nuances that can be compared. If these flavors and aromas are attached to history, geography, and culture, even better.
• I’d like something that gives me a second wind when I’m working on a really difficult project. Something that helps me “get through” and keep going.
• I’d like something that sends me on an experiential journey, where I’m looking forward to how I’m going to feel in the moments ahead.

So what would I need to add to my life to accomplish these same things, to obtain these same services, without using alcohol? It’s fun to answer this question as if the sky were the limit. For example, if I were to seek physical relaxation without ever using alcohol, how would I do it? If there were no financial or time constraints, I’d get a massage every day. I’d hire a personal trainer to help me give my body the level of daily workout that it really needs and wants. Along with my trainer, I’d have a yoga instructor. I’d meditate every day. I’d take two long walks every day. I’d avoid sitting in a chair for more than an hour at a time. I’d do a mountain hike or a forest walk every weekend. I’d make sure to have a regular sleep schedule. Maybe I’d take a dance class.

Is there some reduced form of this that’s actually practical? Yes, but it would take organization, planning, and investment. In many cases I’m looking to alcohol to compensate for a lack of planning. Alcohol makes it easy to get what I want when I want it. It’s the equivalent of ordering physical relaxation or social lubrication or boredom relief on Amazon, at the spur of the moment. Indeed, it resembles Amazon in that it’s effective, convenient, quick-acting, widely available, and socially acceptable. Except alcohol does not present itself as a corporate behemoth – it’s branded as my favorite local up-and-coming independent microbrewery that I’m happy to support. 

The more we order from Amazon, the harder it gets to even know how to find stuff elsewhere. And we don’t feel immediately rewarded when we stop ordering from Amazon. The same goes for drinking. The more we turn to alcohol to “order” the feelings and experiences we want, the less energy we invest in the infrastructure to satisfy our needs in other ways, and the harder it gets to even know how do that. We can quit, but we might not feel immediately rewarded. The reward comes when we replace alcohol with other things. Doing that starts with knowing what we functions we want to replace.

My personal goal in writing this essay is not to quit, but to drink more mindfully, which means drinking less. The idea is to not see “less” as a sacrifice. It’s not about forgoing something I enjoy. It’s about adding “more” of other things I enjoy. To reduce my need for alcohol, what are the rewarding things I already have in my life that I can do more of? What are the new things I can add to my life that I never added before, because alcohol was taking that space?